Category: Video

Netflix released a 12-minute film that makes real sense to engineers and developers

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Netflix released a eerie original film noir this month called Meridian that combines a classic detective tale with bizarre visuals, loud special effects, and creepy imagery. The 12-minute film got 1.5 stars and a few reviews on Netflix. But it wasn’t made for casual viewers. It was released for developers and engineers…

Netflix is giving away the project for free on Xiph.org, which houses a collection of test media, so hardware manufacturers, codec developers, and even competitors like Amazon can experiment with it, Variety reported. They can test the performance of their algorithms and the way streams look on different devices using the footage, which is listed under the Creative Commons 4.0 license. It’s part of how Netflix is pushing Hollywood to think more like Silicon Valley.

“It’s a weird story wrapped up in a bunch of engineering requirements,” Chris Fetner, Netflix’s director for content partner operations, told the publication…

The film has top notch specs, so developers and engineers are working with highest quality Netflix streaming currently offers. It was shot in 4K HDR video with 60 frames per second with a peak brightness level of 4000 nits and Dolby Atmos audio…

Cinema nuts will enjoy the piece regardless. Interesting knowing you’re watching a technical lecture at the same time.

Video: Evolution of E.coli into an antibiotic resistant bacteria

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❝ …At the start of the video, bacteria are dropped into the edges of the dish and soon colonise the outer safe zones. Then they hit their first antibiotic wall, which halts their progress. After a few moments, bright spots appear at this frontier and start spreading outwards. These are resistant bacteria that have picked up mutations that allow them to shrug off the drug. They advance until they hit the next antibiotic zone. Another pause, until even more resistant strains evolve and invade further into the dish. By the end of the movie, even the centre-most stripe—the zone with the highest levels of killer chemicals—is colonised.

❝ What you’re seeing in the movie is a vivid depiction of a very real problem. Disease-causing bacteria and other microbes are increasingly evolving to resist our drugs; by 2050, these impervious infections could potentially kill ten million people a year. The problem of drug-resistant infections is terrifying but also abstract; by their nature, microbes are invisible to the naked eye, and the process by which they defy our drugs is even harder to visualise.

But now you can: just watch that video again. You’re seeing evolution in action. You’re watching living things facing down new challenges, dying, competing, thriving, invading, and adapting—all in a two-minute movie…

❝ when Baym showed the videos at an evolutionary biology conference in Washington DC last month, many attendees were awed and slack-jawed. “It’s exciting, creative and, game-changing,” says Shelly Copley from the University of Colorado, one of the organisers. Baym himself, who has seen the movies hundreds of times, is still blown away by them. “You can actually see mutations happening,” he says, before shaking his head and smiling.

Seeing is believing except – I imagine – for the truly science-challenged. There may be True Believers who think some unreal force causes the same sort of result any and every time the experiment is repeated. We are looking, after all, at a demonstration of evolution.

The scarier part for me is that we’re looking at a consistent direction for bacteria. Antibiotic resistance. We have a finite amount of time remaining before pretty much all our antibiotic wonder drugs are useless.

Click the link up near the beginning to access the whole article. Fascinating chronology.

Coppers asked Facebook to stop Korryn Gaines’ live stream of their confrontation – then they killed her!

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Korryn Gaines
Facebook

❝ In the middle of a five-hour standoff that ended in the death of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County police department to take her social media accounts offline, police have said.

Baltimore County police officers shot and killed Gaines on Monday after she barricaded herself inside her Randallstown apartment with her five-year-old son and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant on charges stemming from a 10 March traffic stop including disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

❝ Gaines was using social media to broadcast the standoff, which began when officers showed up on Monday morning to serve a warrant. Police officials asked Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to suspend Gaines’ accounts through what police called a “law enforcement portal”, a part of the site open to certified law enforcement agencies.

At some point after that, police shot Gaines, killing her…

❝ Though Baltimore County has implemented a body camera program, it is only a few weeks into implementation and according to police none of the officers involved were wearing body cameras, meaning the Facebook video could become particularly important. A police spokeswoman, Elise Armacost, said the department was obtaining a warrant to obtain the videos as evidence.

Activists, however, see such video as the only hope of countering the police narrative. “They get on the 11 o’clock news or the Baltimore Sun with the police side and then everyone forgets it,” said Duane “Shorty” Davis, a Baltimore activist who regularly films encounters with police. “They control the narrative, but in controlling the narrative they have to control social media, because it’s our narrative,” he said. “To keep our message from getting out, they’re going to take [social media] out.”…

❝ No officers were injured, but Gaines’ child was also shot. He was wounded in the arm and is in a good condition in hospital.

Check with your state chapter of the ACLU. I keep an app on my iPhone that streams video directly to the New Mexico chapter via the Cloud. Kept encrypted and secure.

Maybe not as effective as live stream trying to keep coppers from killing you – until they become aware of many folks using the service. Regardless, you’re recording what actually happens. The police, NO social media has any way of interfering with the recording. Of course, the coppers can use electronic devices to interfere with cellphone access. My iPhone is setup to communicate both via wifi and the Web as well as a cellular device.

Yes, I realize we have sufficient tame judges that even this avenue might be blocked. Hackers, geeks, will come up with more answers.

Note #1: The DOJ Report from their investigation of the Baltimore Police Department.

Note #2: Sample form used by cops on the beat to guide paperwork for arrests. It presumes the person arrested is Black.

This 9 minute film got its indie director a gig writing the new Pacific Rim movie

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In just a few years, Emily Carmichael has gone from making an animated webseries for Penny Arcade to writing Pacific Rim: Maelstrom and directing Powerhouse, the next big project from Steven Spielberg.

Today on Ars Technica, we’re proud to host the digital debut of Stryka, one of Carmichael’s short films that rocketed her from gamer geekdom to Hollywood. It’s the tale of a neurotic alien lizard living in Brooklyn, just trying to get by on small time heists. She has just one problem. Her partner in crime just isn’t bringing the zing anymore, and she’s been secretly doing jobs on the side with someone else.

Watch the video. RTFA for a peek inside just how easy – and unlikely – creative success can be.

“Eat That Question” — primary source portrait of Frank Zappa

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“The thing that sets the Americans apart from the rest of the cultures in the world is we’re so fucking stupid,” Frank Zappa declares during the documentary, “Eat That Question.” He adds, “This country has been around for a couple of hundred years, and we think we are hot shit. And they don’t even realize that other countries have thousands of years of history and culture, and they are proud of it.”

Zappa continues, “When we deal on an international level, with foreign policy, and we try going in as this big American strong country, they must laugh up their sleeves at us because we are nothing. We are culturally nothing. We mean nothing. We are only interested in the bottom line. We have Levi’s, designer jeans, hamburgers, and Coca-Cola. We have REO Speedwagon. We have Journey.” He sardonically concludes, “(But) we also have the neutron bomb and poison gas so maybe that makes up for it.”

His words are a sharp critique of American culture, but they also point to the militarism of society. The United States would much rather develop and export deadly weapons to the world. It would much rather globalize capitalism and make money than invest in art and culture. And although his words were uttered more than two decades ago, the essence of his remark still carries great resonance today.

RTFA. Please. Watch the trailer up top. Find the movie and watch it. Learn to sing “Who could imagine…?”

Motion capture dance – beauty, dance and digital effects

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Method Design was tapped by production company RSA to concept and create this year’s AICP Sponsor Reel. The AICP awards celebrate global creativity within commercial production. Method Design wanted to create an entertaining piece of design that encapsulates the innovative and prolific nature of this industry. Our aim was to showcase the AICP sponsors as various dancing avatars, which playfully reference the visual effects used throughout production. Motion capture, procedural animation and dynamic simulations combine to create a milieu of iconic pop dance moves that become an explosion of colorful fur, feathers, particles and more.

Thanks, Ursarodinia